why do you think the male-female things/people...

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Anonymous asked:

why do you think the male-female things/people interest dichotomy doesn't extend to mathematics?

I don’t know and find it really confusing.

The best I can do is say that for some reason, computers count as literal things, but since math is abstract it doesn’t? I realize that totally torpedoes my attempt to link it to systematizing/empathizing, though.

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Update: a commenter suggests that lots of women are interested in being math teachers, and a quick check suggests that profession is 66% female. This would make sense if women planned to be math teachers and majored in math to become so. And it would fit things vs. people really well.

Does that fit with other people’s experience? (especially interested in hearing from math majors and math teachers, pinging @mathionalist )

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Based on https://datausa.io/story/06-16-2016_math-teachers/ and a total lack of comprehensible alternatives, I’m guessing this is the explanation.

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@mathionalist:

My question is why this doesn’t explain chemistry or physics - are women less likely to be teachers in those fields? If so, we’ve just moved the question. If not, is the field so much bigger that that doesn’t matter?

You would know this better than I would, but I think my high school had one chemistry teacher and about five to ten math teachers, though my memory is fuzzy. I also remember going to a middle school with several math teachers and no chemistry classes.

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Update: this spreadsheet says there are 280K math teachers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26411/ says there are between 30K and 40K chemistry teachers.

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Anonymous asked:

Since a young age I've valued romance very much, but I lack sexual feelings towards my sex (not to mention physical danger of that in my country), and the opposite sex are unfeeling uncaring horrible and will screw me over at the earliest opportunity. I know you do not regard death as something innately negative: should I just kill myself already?

Let me guess: whenever you bring this up to other people, they look shocked and say “What? The opposite sex isn’t unfeeling / uncaring / horrible / likely to screw you over! How did you come to believe such terrible things?” and then you dismiss them as corrupted by society and regurgitating platitudes.

(the exact way this conversation goes depends on your gender, but either way, I’m sure it happens)

I don’t think either one of you is wrong. My own experience as a guy is that I both know mostly really good, honest, caring, honorable guys, and that I’ve dated mostly really good, honest, caring, honorable women (and XX nonbinaries). I swear that I’m not just failing to think this through or trying to regurgitate platitudes. On the other hand, I do know people who have really and truly had the opposite experience.

So the question is - why do different people have such different experiences?

My guess is that you’re doing one of the following:

1. Biasedly interpreting social cues from opposite-sex people in a hostile way.

2. Inadvertently exhibiting behavior that causes opposite-sex people to react in a hostile way.

3. Selecting for only the worst members of the opposite sex.

I know people of both sexes for whom each of these three is true. In particular, number 3 is a big deal. There are some people, male and female, who seem to have some kind of compulsion to seek out terrible people to date. They don’t realize this. They don’t want this. But they unfailing spot the worst person in the bar and end up in a relationship with them.

If I were you, I would try some experiments to figure out which of these three is true. For example, if you have a same-sex friend who also knows the opposite-sex people who have betrayed/hurt you, etc, ask if that same-sex friend agrees the opposite-sex person has been a bad person in their interactions with them. If no, that’s some evidence for 1 or 2; if yes, that’s some evidence for 3.

If you have a same-sex friend who always has good experiences with the opposite sex, ask them to set you up on a date with the sort of person they would like. If you don’t find them sexy at all, ignore that feeling and keep going. See if this person is also terrible and wants to hurt you. If not, consider the possibility that you only find terrible/hurtful people sexy and unintentionally seek them out.

Also, it sounds like you’re in some country where homosexuality isn’t tolerated. It also sounds like you’ve absorbed a lot of Western norms (cf. being on Tumblr, reading my blog). Are you sure that your differences with your country’s people aren’t just cultural? Have you tried dating Westerners? Is it better?

If none of that works, there are lots of fun things in life other than sex - like drugs, and rock n’ roll. I still think it would be a shame to kill yourself over this problem.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Do you eat bacon?

I can’t decide whether to feel guilty about it for being unhealthy, for being nonvegetarian, or for being treyf. So sometimes while all the parts of my superego are fighting over that, my id can sneak in and grab a piece before they notice.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Could the "holiday death spike" thing be related to it being the few days right after the solstice, IE some of the coldest, darkest, most depressing days of the year?

The studies show that the death spike is the same in northerly cold latitudes vs. southerly warm latitudes, so probably not.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

If you were Bruce Willis, would you go back for the watch? (This is one of my favourite allegories for Judaism ever)

Man, I don’t know. I think during that scene I was thinking that I would leave without the watch, then have a friend get it a few weeks later and mail it to me. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but cop-out answers are all I’ve got.

But if I did, I definitely wouldn’t stay around to make Pop-Tarts.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Why can't we cut out that thing in the corner of our eye that always itches?

I’m not sure I have this thing. Or, I mean, my eye has a corner, and it itches sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a specific thing there that can be cut out. Am I missing something?

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

What do you think of /ratanon/?

Visiting board billed as “rationalists on 8chan” =

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

is it cool if i start posting on Less Wrong and expounding on UNSONG like it's a religious text? (sort of like what you did to 'There's a Hole in My Bucket' in Interlude ו). i kind of don't want to accidentally make you into a religious figure without your consent.

I don’t think Less Wrong would be an appropriate place for this. If you really want to do it, maybe /r/unsong or /r/slatestarcodex.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

ADD doesn't exist. I'm sure it's more than 20% of people misdiagnosed with it. You're incentivized to pretend it does exist though so =\ just know that my medication ruined my childhood and I have no doubts it ruined others.

Request fewer of these “you are wrong and bad but I will not explain why” asks.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

How does seeing a psychiatrist work--can I just call them and schedule an appointment?

Yes, but make sure they take your insurance first. You can also just call your insurance and ask them which psychiatrists in the area they work with and recommend.

Anonymous

Anonymous asked:

Are any beta blockers good for social anxiety? Will they cause heart problems?

Officially, beta-blockers are not very good for social anxiety. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1558463 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8201073 .

I find this result kind of hard to believe and I would encourage you trying them as a cheap test. The only one I have any experience using is propranalol, because I work in a boring hospital that never lets me do fun things, but this seems to work pretty well.

I am not an expert, but I don’t think beta-blockers should cause heart problems in otherwise healthy people. Some studies suggest they do increase risk of diabetes, though. Some people say that Coreg doesn’t do that, but that sounds like the sort of thing that Coreg manufacturers might pay people to say.

Anonymous

worldlypositions

Over the Atlantic

I am told that knowing about the planning fallacy and trying to account for it does not avert the planning fallacy. I wonder if this is because people are dutifully trying to shift their expectation of something going wrong appropriately close to 100%, when the actual expectation should be closer to 5000%. Nonetheless, I caught my plane and am successfully moving at six hundred miles per hour above the Atlantic Ocean. The contrast between the ease of this and the ease of moving at half a mile per hour from my bed to the bathroom at the start of this journey feels like a good example of something.

And while a few things have gone wrong, probably more things have gone especially right. Moving my things in a giant suitcase turns out to be much less terrible than lugging them around on my back in a bulging ‘personal item’, as is my usual strategy. Especially because someone else is in charge of the giant suitcase now.

There was no queue to check in, security was easy, my gate was right outside it, separated only by a shop I wanted to go to. I was fairly anxious at the start of the plane trip, but then a nice flight attendant gave me multiple tiny bottles of wine to drink. He also kindly informed me that my airplane food, while dubious in ways, was not dangerous and that I should just eat it, which is something I usually miss traveling alone.

This plane has a respectable selection of movies and TV. As well as a less respectable selection, from which I have mostly selected. I watched ‘Why him?’, a movie portraying a Silicon Valley billionaire boyfriends as a sort of horrifying other species, unable to communicate with or understand normal humans, but ultimately friendly. While I’m not opposed to laughing at the oddities of Silicon Valley boyfriends, I thought it was interesting that for this to work they had to basically make the guy seem really clueless and stupid in ways. Even though most such people are pretty smart. I wonder if the writers are not that familiar with such people, so don’t know how to justify a smart person behaving in laughable ways. But maybe it is just funnier if you exaggerate it to the point that it is impossible to justify.

I watched a TV show about finding strangers who look identical to each other, and getting them together to see how alike they are. If it was a real test roughly as presented, it was very striking. Of the seven pairs they had on the show, one pair were both homosexual night club workers with the same hair style, and another pair had the same first and last names. They mentioned a lot of other similarities between pairs, but those seemed more like what you might come up with if you took two random people and looked for things in common. Or things that would tend to make you either look similar or find each other. However the two coincidences I mention seem surprising. I suppose the show probably just had a lot of such people to choose from, and took the most interestingly similar ones. Which they didn’t explicitly claim to not be doing. But that seems naughty.

I downloaded Instapaper, and have been finding it a surprisingly appealing way to read things (surprising because nothing is an appealing way to read things). Possibly it just seemed appealing because I filled it with things from the archives of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist.

I listened to half of a podcast about Alexander Hamilton, who seems to be now permanently classed in my mind as ‘topic of derpy fictional amusement’ rather than ‘history it would be virtuous to know about’. Hopefully I can gradually expand this circle so that the agricultural revolution seems like particularly obscure backstory to Hamilton, nonetheless fascinating to a fan.

The podcast said that Hamilton the musical is about the conflict between being shiny and political, and being straightforward and doing the work you think is important, or something like that. As represented by Burr and Hamilton. I observe that Burr and Hamilton also seem to represent a conflict between waiting for it and grabbing opportunity immediately. Which makes me wonder if those axes are related.

For instance, I wonder if waiting a lot is in general a better strategy in social spheres than it is in object-level ones, because there is often more to be permanently lost. Like, if you say a dumb thing people can bring it up forever, whereas from the perspective of object level inquiry, you can change your mind about it in five minutes when you decide that it is wrong. I’m not sure if this holds for actions more serious than saying things—if you run your company into the ground or burn down your house it may be hard to undo, but you can recover socially (eventually).

That podcast was destroyed randomly, and can’t be recovered because accessing the internet on this plane seems to require the internet. So instead I listened to a third of a podcast about people killing other people. I think some of them were the Assyrians. Some of their killing was especially not nice. That’s all I know, because I only listened to it for like an hour, and apparently Assyrians are not yet catalogued under ‘obscure Hamilton backstory’ yet.

atlantic ocean actual travel

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Over the Atlantic